Chapter 2 of Feather Strings

(Another 4 pages on my ipod!)

After the 147th eternity, called school, I had experienced this year, I was pretty eager to go home. Sadly for me and the two people who got in my way, that wasn't going to happen that easily.

I heard a commotion in the part of the hallway pretty much directly in front of my locker. I elbowed my way through the crowd that was beginning to form. Inside the semicircle of people, Fang and Dylan were going at it. Again. "My two favourite people..." I mumbled sarcastically, then jumped in.

Through the tangle of their arms and legs, I managed to grab each of their shirt collars and roughly shove them apart. For a moment, they still tried to throttle each other, until they realized that I, a girl, had managed to hold back two built guys going at it with all their might. No one else seemed to notice this fact, and once they realized that no punches were going to land, they began to disperse. I lifted Fang, who's real name was actually Nick, and Dylan each by their collars, onto their tiptoes and cheerfully told them in a perfect valley girl voice, "Like, hi! Do you, like, think that you could, you know, like, move your petty fighting away from my, like, locker?" I let them drop, and they stared at me, too shocked to fight, as I packed my bag and shut the locker.

Yeah, the super strength and athletic ability came with the wings. "Iggy!" I called to him from the other end of the hallway and made sure that my voice guided his visually blind, but not in any other way blind, body to me. "C'mon!"

It was a nice day, so Iggy and I opted not to take the bus home and to use the environmentally sound option. Yeah, baby, I'm talking about flying. How else would we be able to put up with wings if we couldn't fly? We raced each other to our take off spot, a clearing, conveniently shaped like a

runway, in the woods behind our school. After I let Iggy take off, ( I needed to be able to catch him if he miscalculated and hit a tree or something.) I sprinted ten feet and jumped, pumping my wings down hard, making sure they got me airborne enough to fly normally. I joined Iggy, who was hovering about a thousand feet up.

"So what did you do in class that made everyone laugh?" Iggy, who because he was blind, sat beside me in all my classes. "I mean, I heard the note thing and everything, but what did you do with the note?"

"I ate it." I replied bluntly. "How did you do getting to second period? Dod J.J. guide you?"

"Yeah, and I have to say that J.J. Is smokin'"

I punched Iggy in the arm, not an easy maneuver to pull of 3000 feet in the air while going 50 miles an hour. "You can't even see her face." We flew around the countryside for awhile. Our family lived in a farm about 20 minutes from school and half and hour from anyone else's house so we could fly freely. Our flight from school and home took, like, 10 seconds, so Iggy and I usually detoured.

"Yeah," Iggy countered "but I felt her face."

"Don't you dare going after J.J. You're my brother and she's my best friend." I warned. "If you broke her heart, I'd whack you so hard that you could see again, then twist your spindly little spine so you could see me kick your ass."

We landed in our yard, which stretched on forever, because it was supposed to be a farm, and walked in the front door of our rustic house.

"Max! Iggy!" Angel cried joyfully. She gave us each a hug, her blue eyes sparkling. "Guess what Tommy gave me?" she held out a chubby, six year old fist. "Guess!"

"Uhhhh... A tiger!" I guessed.

"No..." She giggled.

"Tell us please!" Iggy cried dramatically. "The suspense I killing me!"

"A chocolate!" she opened her fist to reveal a crumpled tinfoil wrapper. "I was going to give you some, Max, but I got hungry and ated it already!"

I laughed. Angel was just so adorable.

"I know I'm adorable!" Angel sang as she skipped off, holding Iggy's hand. Remember when I nonchalantly mentioned that we had powers? Well, there's an example. Angel can read minds. All of us have their own powers, which appeared at random times.

Angel, the little dickens, started reading minds shortly after she learned how to talk. Nudge, who used to be worried that she was a mess-up because she didn't get a power until last year, can do pretty much ANYTHING on a computer, almost as if her brain is connected to it. Gazzy's power isn't anything worth mentioning. If you really want to know, look at his name, and give it the power of an atomic bomb. Gazzy is also really good at mimicking voices and sounds. Iggy's ability is to cook really well, even though he's blind, and sometimes he can sense color fields. I have a hard time understanding it myself, but I can say that on a really snowy winter day, when the only colors are grey and white, he can see nearly as well as anyone else. And me? I can fly at a supersonic speed, up to three hundred miles an hour, and even more during down hill flight. Sometimes, though I haven't been able to control when it happens yet, I can move objects with my mind.

"Max!" Came my mothers voice from the kitchen. She was putting a pan if her famous chocolate chip cookies i the oven.

"Yes?" I asked innocently. I washed my hands and stole two balls of raw cookie dough off a plate.

"I got a call from the school today. Again. What was it about?"

"You mean they didn't tell you?" I asked with a full mouth.

"Dean tried to, but he was laughing too hard."

"Then it's nothing to worry about." I told her, licking my fingers.

"Hey, Max." Nudge said walking into my room in the barn a few days later. She climbed up the stairs to my specially made bunk (I was extremely tall, 5'11" at the age of almost 16) and sat down on the edge. "Do you ever wonder if there's anyone else like us out there. With, you know, wings? Didn't you say there were two others in the school with you? What if they weren't dead and we got to meet them and they joined us?"

Nudge also had the gift to talk incessantly. "No, Nudge." I lied. I've never thought about that."

The next day, I was sitting -err, napping, in Math class when a note hit me in the shoulder. I unfolded it.

'Hey Max. How did you pull us apart yesterday? :S? -Fang'

The note was written in a neat, heavy black scrawl. I quickly wrote a response. A lie, because I didn't exactly want my 'secret' out.

'I don't know what you're talking about. Maybe it was just adrenaline. Max'

I looked behind me. Good he was directly behind me, so I didn't have to risk my rep having people know I passed a note to him. Ha. Yeah right. I just didn't want to get caught. I passed the note to him, and for a second, our eyes met.

I suppressed the urge to gasp as I turned around. There was some thing eerily familiar about his eyes. The note came back to me, and our conversation went like this.

Fang: liar. There's no way u got adrenaline from that.

Me: maybe im strong.

Fang: strong enough to hold back and practically lift up not one but two built jocks?

Me: why are you passing notes with me? I don't even think I know you...

I didn't add how spooked I was by the familiarity in his eyes. He sent me another note, but I didn't read it, I just shoved it in my bag.

I was less bored when the bell finally rang because of the note passing. I looked out at the sky on my way to the lunch room. "Ig, do your wings hurt too?" I asked.

"Yeah. Do you think there's a storm coming?" He said.

I looked out the window. Black clouds were netting together in the sky, and the wind was blowing. "Yeah. Judging by the ways my wings feel," I said 'wings' extra quiet. "it looks like it'll be a stormy week. I say the worst storm will be tomorrow."

"I agree." Iggy said simply.

Some people get headaches when a storm is about to come. Others get a painful trick knee or whatever. My family? Save mom, everyone in my family got sore wings when there would be summer storms and itchy wings when there was a big winter storm. It was a pretty useful weather systems. Somedays, even without storms, our wings got sore because we had to tuck them in tightly around our backs. We could only let them out at home, but sometimes that was awkward because we got caught in doorways.

As Iggy and I stood in front of my locker, grabbing our lunch money, I noticed Fang a few lockers down, changing his jacket. I saw the back of his t-shirt, where there two slits down the back, just like we did on our undershirts. It had to be a coincidence, didn't it?